eXpertise of Getting free content for your blog posted a solution at the Google Blogger Help group (a public forum), which since I don't use FTP, I cannot test. However, I will just paste the solution he offered below:
"You can use FTP to publish the blog on your own site. you can also customize the template to look like your own site. there is no need to use the api or any programming language. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is enough. learning the few custom blogger tags can also be helpful. you can see the help file and also seek help here."
If Google had not disabled "reply to author" in all Google groups in which Google employees participate, I would contact him to let him know about this post. Since I can't do that, I will do the next best thing and comment in his post to let him know about this post and the link I put to his post.
